Fake News, It’s Nothing New

Fake news. It’s a term which we’ve encountered a lot the past couple years. However, as history attests, it’s not a new phenomenon. Fake news, or the reporting of fabrications as if they were real, is older than the invention of the printing press. It’s not that there aren’t reporters and media genuinely dedicated to bringing honest news of the world to the general population. It’s just that it seems a media with widespread customers who rely upon that media to know what’s going on in the world is apparently too readily manipulable a commodity for unscrupulous politicians and profiteers not to take advantage of.

Most of the time, in centuries past or the past several decades, it seems “fake news” is most often used to incite fear and conflict. Or to cover up the misdeeds of those powerful enough to manipulate the media to do so. A recent movie, “The Post”, memorializes the spirit of some who were willing to be politically incorrect, and more, in order to bring the truth to the public. Does that spirit still exist?

Just in my lifetime the shadow of unexplained realities around some horrendous events calls to question whether genuine, hardcore, investigative journalism, at least in the “mainstream media”, has become unfashionable, threatened, if not facing extinction. The Kennedy assassinations, Oklahoma City, 9/11. These are a few instances in which the media is used to repetitiously reassert highly suspect official stories. Those who do dare point out the inconsistencies are often dismissed with the label “conspiracy theorist”. What makes the difference between a “conspiracy theorist” and an award winning investigative journalist? Is it too often merely the willingness, or reluctance, of those who control “mainstream media” to report certain realities? We need a media which consistently places truth above politics.